Steps to Creating a Peaceful Mind

Calm Your Mind

• Take a moment to stop what you’re doing right now.
• Close your eyes.
• Focus your awareness by bringing your hand to your heart.
• Take a deep breath and put all of your attention on your breathing.
• Ask yourself: What do you want? What are you grateful for?
• Breathe normally and just be present in this moment.
• Open your eyes.
• How do you feel?
• Peace and quiet are precious and rare commodities these days, especially in a day full of distractions and conflict.
• Your brain is like a supercomputer. It comes preinstalled with an operating system that is susceptible to overwhlem and distraction.
• To create a peaceful mind, you need to install more of what’s in your nature: calm, harmony, and balance.
• Your brain is not designed to run full throttle 24/7.
• To avoid burnout, you have to take time to quiet your mind.
• A sense of calm and peace of mind is something you have, it’s something you create.

Remember Q.U.I.E.T

Q = Questions

• Questions are the answer. Ask yourself the right questions, and you’ll get better answers.
• Questions focus your thoughts and filter out the noise cluttering your mind.
• You can try asking yourself some questions like: What do you live for? What are you grateful for? Who are you thankful for? What makes you happy?
• Notice when you ask questions, it directs your focus.
• If you want to calm your mind, direct your focus, and increase your concentration, ask more questions.
• They help clear out the noise and find what’s most important.

U = Unplug

• It’s important to disconnect in order to reconnect.
• Your mind is under never-ending assault from app notifications, social media alerts, calendar reminders, etc.
• One of the easiest ways to calm your mind is to turn off as many distractions as possible.
• The hustle 24/7 mentality believes that constant work is positive and that breaks equate to laziness.
• But science disagrees.
• There are a lot of benefits to performance and productivity when you have peace of mind.
• An easy way to ground yourself is spending time in nature.
• A Stanford University study found that participants who walked in nature had lower blood flow to the parts of the brain associated with rumination.
• Rumination is what you do when you can’t stop thinking negative thoughts about yourself or get stuck in a negative mental pattern.
• Whenever possible, spend time outside.
• Maybe take your lunch break at the park or go for a walk on your break.

I = Integrate

• This is referring to sensory integration.
• It’s the process of receiving information through your senses.
• You organize that information and use it to participate in daily activities.
• In addition to the five senses of sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch, you have two other senses.
• The first is your vestibular sense.
• This is your sense of movement and balance that tells your brain where your head and body are in space.
• It’s what allows you to stay upright while you sit, stand, and walk.
• You can learn more about how to use your vestibular sense to gain peace of mind in our episode with Aaron Alexander, here.
• The other sense is proprioception.
• That’s your body awareness.
• It tells your brain where your body parts are relative to each other and how much force to exert when completing certain activities like cracking an egg.
• In addition to regulating your awareness through the five senses, studies have shown that you can do this through balance and body awareness as well.
• Techniques like dimming the lights, sitting under a weighted blanket, gently swaying while on an exercise ball, or balancing on one leg all help bring you into your body and out of your mind.
• Use your senses to calm your mind by redirecting your attention back into your body.
• Ask yourself: What does your breathing feel like? What can you taste? Hear? Smell?
• Yoga is an excellent exercise to help with this.
• It engages your parasympathetic dominance response which triggers relaxation.
• Through deep diaphragmatic breathing and focused physical movements, yoga helps with relaxation by developing better body awareness.

E = Exercise

• Will Smith does two things every day: he runs and reads.
• You have to exercise both your body and mind to achieve peace of mind.
• Neurological research has identified a strong link between aerobic exercise and cognitive clarity.
• Exercise also leads to neurogenesis—the birth of new brain cells—primarily in the hippocampus.
• The hippocampus is the region of the brain associated with learning and memory.
• This may explain why so many studies identify a link between aerobic exercise and memory improvement.

T = Transcendental Meditation

• It doesn’t have to be this specific type of meditation to be effective in helping calm your mind.
• Transcendental meditation is one of the most widely practiced and researched meditation techniques.
• It’s a nonreligious type of method of relaxation, stress reduction, and self-development.
• Mindfulness is the practice of focusing your mind on a particular object or thought to achieve mental clarity and calm.
• When your brain is scattered you can slow it down in seconds if you make those seconds count.
• Slow the pace of your breathing, so your exhale is longer than your inhale.
• This simple technique activates your parasympathetic nervous system and tells your brain everything is fine so it can relax.
• You can also add in other senses while you meditate.
• Using aromatherapy with essential oils like lavender can help you see even better results.
• If you find that it’s uncomfortable sitting in silence, another tool to help calm racing thoughts is guided meditation.
• This works really well because you don’t have to actively try to quiet your mind, you allow someone to guide your thoughts instead.
• Another tool to help with meditation is the Muse headband.
• You can listen to our episode with Muse founder, Ariel Garten, here.
• The UCLA Laboratory of Neuroscience found that people who meditate show more gray matter in certain regions of the brain.
• Meditation leads to stronger connections between brain regions and show less age-related brain atrophy.
• In other words, meditation can make your brain bigger, faster, and younger.

Kwik Review

• Q stands for quiet.
• U stands for unplugged.
• I stands for integration.
• E stands for exercise.
• T stands for Transcendental Meditation.
• Remember this quote: “Peace does not mean to be in a place where there is no noise, trouble. or hard work. Peace means to be in the midst of all those things and still be calm in your heart.”
• Next time you need to calm you mind, use the QUIET technique.

Share With Us

• Take a screenshot and tag us (@jimkwik) and share your favorite relaxation technique.
• If you’d like to explore more relaxation techniques to calm your mind, listen here and here.